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Monster under the bed

Did you have a monster under the bed?

  • Yes

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • No

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Total voters
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  • Poll closed .
no monster under my bed, or anything other than a bit of dust.
 
After watching The Owl Service in the, what, late 70's? I developed a fear of birds becoming trapped in the attic space above my bedroom. Sure enough, scratching noises followed for a few months until I got over it. I think I really pissed my mum off with it all.

There was also the sound of my dads (only his - they were that specific) footsteps endlessly on the stairs as I lay in bed that I later realised was the blood coursing somewhere close to my inner ear, or something.
 
Yeah,safe to say I had some monsters under the bed.Since I was 3 til about 10,I can say I was very much under the impression of things under my bed.I think there was a big eyed chap,and a spidery thing.
The big eyed chap would peek up from the corners of the bed [usually at strang angles],and the spidery thing would shake the bed,or me.
I guess in order to combat them,I use to try to imagine a dragon under there,that would only eat other monsters.It kinda made sense in my head to have a savage beast on my side,but not under my control.[I was a weird kid]It sorta worked.They just would make the bed shake from underneath.
Around 10,can't be sure what happened to stop it,but it just never happened again.
 
Speculation

If any of these monsters are real and not imaginary, there must be some powerful force that stops them from causing physical harm to kids.
 
My six year old son has recently started talking again about a small black bear (he thinks it is a naughty baby bear) which he sees at night. He first mentioned it when he was very young, can't remember exactly when, but he was still in his cot. The bear walks up and down the landing with its paws behind its back and nose in the air trying to look nonchalant (as demonstrated by my son). The bear then runs into my sons bedroom and grabs a toy, then runs down the stairs and out of the house through the wall. He says he will let me know if he sees it again! :eek:
 
I quite like the idea of this bear strolling around trying to look casual. :) Does your son use it as a reason for his toys going missing?
 
My son reckons that once, when he was a toddler in his cot, the bear took a giraffe which was one of a set of animals and it is still missing.

He also says that the bear is the reason for his bedroom being untidy as the various piles of toys are booby traps for it. He does tend to make these piles of toys by his bedroom door though.
 
The Underneather

Years ago I collected all my "monster feelings" (the intuitive ideas about those things under the bed) and wrote a story called "The Underneather". As I wrote it, I realized there were a lot of "rules": like they can't get you if you hold perfectly still and hold your breath as if you were dead. (Wonder what the monsters thought of the false high child mortality rate in my neighborhood?)

I recall a frightening collary to the "can't get you if most of you is under the covers" bit. My mother tucked in the edges of my blanket so hard, when I hopped in bed at night and pulled it up to my chin, I didn't pull it closer so much as stretch it. So I'd wake up in the middle of the night feeling the blanket creep down ever so slowly from my upper chest. "They" were trying to get around the "under the covers" rule in an evil, crafty fashion! I set my little fists like cement over the upper edge of the blanket (naturally, if I seized the covers and dragged them up, they'd see I was awake).

Sometimes I'd wake up, eyes still closed, and feel sure that if I opened my eyes, I'd be staring right into the ogling orbs of a flesh-eating Thing only inches away. So I kept my lids shut tight and tried to breathe regularly, as if still asleep.

Yes, the wondrous days (and nights) of youth!

Oh -- in my story, there's a rule that "they" can move around your room and play with your toys, but they can't leave any evidence for daylight, so everything's always back where it was the night before. But one day young Tim wakes to find all his clothing and books and toys piled in a single mound in the middle of the floor . . .
 
Under the Covers

Curious - how many of us still sleep with our head under the covers?

I do. Even on a stifling hot summer night I'll lay a light shirt or a hand towel over my head.

Beats my childhood, though, when I looked like the most camouflaged infantryman in the history of warfare.
 
The bear walks up and down the landing with its paws behind its back and nose in the air trying to look nonchalant
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That reminds me of Pooh Bear. Is there a cartoon or storybook with him in that pose that your lad may have seen?
 
escargot1 said:
The bear walks up and down the landing with its paws behind its back and nose in the air trying to look nonchalant
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That reminds me of Pooh Bear. Is there a cartoon or storybook with him in that pose that your lad may have seen?
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That certainly rings a bell. Wasn't he trying to look casual so that the bees wouldn't know he had designs on their hunny? I think there's an illustration in one of the books to that effect. I think it's very likely that a child would pick up a memorable image from a book (or TV, nowadays) and incorporate it into a dream. I know I still do...

First one to post a link to an EH Shepherd drawing of a casual bear gets 100 FT bonus points!

I'm reminded of the Little Britain sketch - "No, I'm sorry, I wanted a casual bear - that one looks decidedly nonchalant. Not what I wanted at all".
 
I definetly had a skeleton under my bed, which would grab my ankles if I got to close to the bed. I was known to jump into my bed from about half a meter away. So one night my brother thought i would be funny to turn off the light as I was halfway to the bed, apparently I jumped from there AND made it [he was amazed about that for years to come] :roll:

One of my schoolmates however had a "robber" [not a thief or burglar but a robber] under his bed whose only misconduct was holding a candle. So my friend was more scared in bed than walking towards it as he thought the candle would burn his backside [he said that sometimes he could feel the heat :shock: ]. Never heard that one again.
 
The only monsters under my bed were some really big crab-like spiders.
They were real, and not a product of my fevered imagination. :shock:
 
Unseen dog

I think I may have written about the unseen dog before, but I can't find the message through search, so I'll attempt to be brief.

I never worried about anything being under the bed or in the closet, probably because I can see pretty well at night (yes, I wear very dark glasses anytime I'm outdoors during daylight--even when the weather is bleak and raining).

There was this dog thing that made its presence known whenever my family was about to move (happened a lot since my dad was in the Navy and always getting reposted). Anyway, the dog's collar had a bell, and I could hear the bell ringing as the dog ran around the house that we were leaving. It always ran around the house once.

Kind of strange, but I didn't know that I was afraid of the dog, until I was in my teens.

I was standing in front of a huge picture window when I heard the dog's bell. The dog came from behind me around the corner of the house, and just as it would have had to run into view across the window, I shouted "Stop!" And the sound of the bell stopped completely.

Never heard it again and never figured out what that was all about.
 
Elisheva's post reminded me of a tape recording I once heard, a series of hypnosis sessions administered by a psychiatrist to a middle-aged women suffering from a severe phobia regarding dogs.

The woman had been raised on a farm. The sessions revealed that when the girl had been four years old she'd had a two-year-old sister. One day as they played in a mound of hay the littler girl had become fatally impaled on a pitchfork.

Late that evening, after the dead girl had been prepared for burial, the older sister walked (in her nightdress) into the sitting room, took the baby out of the coffin, and childishly attempted to bring the tragic little victim back to life.

The family dog then entered through the door which the girl had left standing open and tried to grab hold of the corpse. When the parents eventually came into the room they found the girl in tears, trying to hold the corpse over her head and away from the dog.

(Things weren't helped by the fact that until her dying day the mother remained convinced that older sister had murdered the younger.)

Thus the dog phobia.

The psychiatrist CURED this by hypnototically creating an "invisible dog" which only the patient could see - and touch! The dog followed her around for a week, invisible to all except herself. In the evening she'd sit and pet the dream-animal.

By the time the psychiatrist "vanished" the dog a week later so had the patient's phobia.
 
I must have been a very sick child. The only things under my bed were dust and occasionally small handtowels. I actually slept in a bed next to my grandmother`s. They were two single beds pushed together... They were also on wheels. The wheels were always locked so they didn`t move easily, but if you lay in the very middle they would slowly move to the side and you`d slip into the small gap between them.

That is what I did at night. Especially in summer. There was a very powerful window fan in the window, and I would stand in front of it in the dark until I was horribly cold then burrow down into the hole - all while imagining I was some sort of burrowing, hibernating mammal. When I landed on the floor below the bed I would scoot out from under the bed, return to my own, and either repeat or sleep.

Under the bed was actually a very safe feeling place. It was the attic door, just to the side of my bed, that was scary. I had a chair wedged up against it, covered in pillows to hide the door and the gap between my bed and the chair. I know now that the very occasional noises I heard from the attic way were squirrels, and I actually knew then too - but I always envisioned flesh eating squirrels, consuming a corpse that was lying, rotting, just at the top of the stairs. I imagined that the minute someone opened the trapdoor at the top of the attic stair, putrid liquid remains would pour down on to them.
The flesheating squirrels weren`t all that scary. It was the dead body they were surely feeding on.
 
Predatorpt said:
All the problems with the "monster under the bed" stopped when I started using that space as a storing space. I think he couldn't survive with all that junk (old socks, comic books, trainers, old pc parts) in top of him. :twisted:
:lol:
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I've always stored a lot of toys and stuff under the bed. That must be why my "monster" rabbits were hiding themself in the nearest clothing storage cabinet instead.
:lol:
 
If anyone out there remember Boglins (Basically a goblin puppet), I used to think that one of those lived under my bed. I'd hear breathing under my bed at night, and I had a toy Boglin under my bed, so of course the most logical explanation was that it came to life at night.

In hindsight, it was probably just my cat under the bed that I could hear breathing. But of course when you're a kid, the most logical explanation is never the most likely :p
 
Strangely enough, just yesterday, for no apparent reason, I thought of Boglins. Seriously.

It wasn't an advert, or someone mentioning it, rather, I just thought fondly of the Boglins from my youth. I loved the one I had. Can't even remember what it looked like now, but you could move the eyes around with your fingers inside it.

Seems that kind of thing happens to me often. I'll think of a quote from a given movie and then realize that it will probably be on either that night, or the next. 9 times out of ten, it is. Wish I could do that with lotto numbers.
 
I got to thinking about childhood "witch in the closet" fears and it reminded me of how often "closed spaces" are associated with paranormal reports - from the Chase Vault in Barbadoes to the cabinet of the Spiritualist medium to Dr. Wilhelm Reich's "orgone boxes." (And those are merely the first three examples that pop to mind.)

So if children DO experience the paranormal in their bedrooms at night, MIGHT it develope in or enter through the closet?
 
My Boglin was one of these chaps:

largedwork.jpg


*Shudders*

On the closet thing, my mum told my sister and I that if we didn't keep them closed at night ghosts would come out to get us.

To this day I can't sleep with my closet open.
 
_Gnomey_ said:
"On the closet thing, my mum told my sister and I that if we didn't keep them closed at night ghosts would come out to get us. To this day I can't sleep with my closet open."
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Conversely, some kids can't sleep with the closet door CLOSED, for fear that something nasty will grow and fester in that closed container.

Ah, mothers. Mine had me convinced at age eight that if I didn't rinse every last bit of soap film from the washed supper dishes that "the very next person to drink from that glass or eat off that plate will immediately drop dead from Soap Poisoning."

This may help explain why I hold so many outre notions today. <g>
 
Gnomey, that is the exact one that I had. I was looking for that specific pic. Thank you for that.
 
I used to imagine that there were snakes under my bed, and was terrified that they'd get under the sheets unless they were tucked in. :shock:
 
Snakes Under the Bed

"Snakes under the bed" has a powerful resonance for many people.

Ambrose Bierce got a classic short story out of it, and one of the best-known American radio plays, "A Shipment of Mute Fate," featured an explorer shipping out from the Amazon basin who found himself sharing a stateroom with a giant Anaconda.
 
StormMagic said:
I used to imagine that there were snakes under my bed, and was terrified that they'd get under the sheets unless they were tucked in. :shock:
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I got a very odd mental image from the second phrase in this sentence. ;)
 
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